Oh, what a wonderful love letter to the strategy RPGs of yesteryear. This game, while rough in the earlly access stage, knows where it's going, what it wants to do, and is absolutely heading there.

Do I reccommend the game right now, as of launch day? I have to say, hesitantly, no. (I still give it a yes for reasons listed below) It's a bit TOO rough, as is expected of what is a mid-beta level of development. The story isn't complete just yet, The UI isn't finished, which makes things a bit awkward to play, and accessibility and understanding the game feels pretty monolithic since the tooltips and explanations of stats and the like aren't finished... yet!

Should you BUY this game if you are a fan of strategy RPGs, right now, in it's current state? Oh my goodness yes! Support the dev, it's one guy and he's working hard to get the game into a polished and complete state. Give him the backing and support he needs to wrap up the last bits of development and polish the game to a shine.

This review will be updated to reflect development state as it progresses.

Himeko Sutori is pretty great as far as tactical JRPGs go, and it combines a lot of different game elements to make a pretty spiffy package. It's a pretty grindy game, with permadeath for individual units (despite this being a game with larger armies, it hurts as you build up each one and purchase them as mercenaries) and a nifty leveling system based on cards (drawing 3 from what I assume is a class-based deck).)

Graphics are nice for the type of game it is- while character portraits might look a certain way, a nice touch is that armor equipped actually does change the portraits, if nothing else. Combat gameplay is relatively simplistic as you position lances and guard, attack, or attack from afar as the three actions- but Himeko Sutori's real focus seems to be building up and training the army in the first place, which is something I enjoy quite a bit.

A more sandbox-styled campaign or game mode would probably be appreciated- the current campaign is nice and all, but certain sections of the story are quite limiting, requiring grind walls to get literally anywhere else- and customizing things like unit names and portraits, while understandably not a part of the current campaign, would still be a nice touch elsewhere.

The dev seems to be really active, which is nice. There's a campaign editor, though it seems to be the Unreal Engine editor and thus isn't necessarily as simple as "campaign editor" might sound. There's definitely a lot of things planned in this game's future regarding that and other campaigns from the sounds of it.

If you're a fan of strategy RPGs and don't mind a lot of grind, you should probably give this a go.

This is the tactics style RPG I have dreamed of. A large army of characters that you develop individually to effect a cohesive fighting force.

Character development is just the right blend of choice mixed with a slight random chance of a variation. Deep mixes of equipment find you stock piling an armory for when you need to adjust classes and focus.

Surpringly we'll done for an EA with tons of content (I like the story). I can only imagine where this game is going after EA when it is already so novel and fun!

The Game reminds me a bit about Final Fantasy Tactics with the amount of classes and learning to become one.However in this game you make armies rather than a single unit, your Squad Leader's Leadership ability determins the amount of points you have to spend on additional troops, the more troops in a unit the more attacks and abilities it will have.

You can think of it like making a raid party in an MMO, you need someone to Lead, You need someone to heal, you might want a melee or two in your Ranged damage squad incase they become attacked in melee, things like that. It is very fun but a bit clunky interface before you learn it. Once you learn it the game is both fun and easy to learn.

The main satisfaction of this game is leveling up your characters and making your lances.

On the battlefield, you don't control individual characters. Instead, you assign them outside of battle to "lances" which essentially act a single unit on the field of battle.

A lance might contain a mage, a warrior, and a healer type. And when you attack or defend, each of those characters will do their jobs. You can specialize and make an all melee lance, all ranged attack lance, etc., but I've found in general it's best to make all of them have a few melee, few ranged, and some sort of healer.

The game is very very grindy and the combat is decent. It gets a bit repetitive and is not super tactical. In fact it is extremely easy. As long as you take a bit of time to level your party on the armies scattered across each map, you will never have any trouble.

And if you enjoy this game, that is what you will do, because that's where the satisfaction comes from. Because of the plethora of characters and classes at your disposal, you basically get to level someone (often multiple units) up after each battle. And leveling them and outfitting them is the fun part of the game.

The story is not good. It's very linear. Each area has the tried and true "Are you sure you want to continue? You won't be able to come back" trope. The main characters are annoying. They talk about how God is on their side constantly. At one point one of the protagonists made everyone stop so they could say a prayer. Very early in the game you have to catch a bandit - when you meet him he explains that he is against the monarchy and just wants to give some wealth to the downtrodden people, and says you are the bad guy. And your protagonist say you aren't because God wants you to rule everyone basically. I was kind of with the bandit.

The game has a crafting system but it doesn't do a great job of steering you into using it too often. For instance, I have tons of mats for certain items (and unit summons) but don't have the recipes. And you have to find certain nodes to make the items/units, which are not always readily available. This could be streamlined a bit. There are usually ingredients you get from battles, like iron ore, but then you might also need coal, which you buy from vendors, at which point you go ok, this is getting tedious, I'll just buy all my gear.

*Despite all this, YES I recommend it! The grinding and leveling and gearing up your units is very satisfying.*

I hope the devs iron out and streamline some of the issues (there are some UI and QoL tweaks that would go a long way which I didn't get into - plus make the crafting system better). I doubt the story will get any better, but I can live with that.

One of my great laments in gaming is that Final Fantasy Tactics would so overshadow its predecessor, Tactics Ogre, despite Tactics Ogre being a much richer, deeper game. However, at least people still have been introduced to its gameplay through Final Fantasy Tactics, which has in turn inspired many other games. The same cannot be said for Ogre Battle, which preceded Tactics Ogre but had completely different mechanics that had you leading a while army, not merely a squad. It has largely been forgotten, not only by gamers, but by designers as well. At least until now, with this game, Himeko Sutori, which takes the leading an army aspect and combines it with more traditional turn based combat.

As in Ogre Battle, you control an army that is grouped into a number of units, here called lances. Each lance can have up to 10 characters in it (with a maximum of 20 lances), each with thier own class, gear, and level. While you control the movement of each lance, each member of the lance will attack (or cast a spell) on its own, depending on its character class and weapon. It's quite a bit of fun (and addictive) setting up your army, your lances, all the gear.

Most of the game play involves you moving your army around a landscape and fighting randomly generated enemy armies. Just what you can encounter depends on which world map you are on (there are four right now), but generally includes bandits (armies like yours, basically), slimes, forest creatures (both animals and faeries), undead, and later on, even robots.

Battles are surprisingly quick, maybe about 10 minutes (if that). Eventually you will need to return to a town to buy food, gear up, and probably hire more recruits, as there is permadeath for units.

Right now, there isn't a lot of story content. But's its a fairly interesting premise. Basically you play as three sisters (really the youngest) who are the daughters of Japanese Daiymo (but who actually seems to be Arabian, though the sisters mother was Japanese) of an English like country. You are sent off to deal with a bandit, but things get complicated, requiring you to travel through world gates to other lands.

Right now, Himeko Sutori is a rough diamond, unpolished, incomplete, but despite this is incredibly fun and addictive.

The closest comparison I can come up with here would be Ogre Battle from way back in the day or Last Remnant from a decade ago. Still in early access and it shows in places with some bugs here and there but nothing preventing a solid play through of the early access content with minimal disruptions. Definitely worth the modest cost investment. I've gotten a solid 20 hours out of the game so @ roughly $1/hr that's a pretty good return on investment.

Pros:--Unique take on the tactical RPGs that hasn't been done in quite some time.--Combat is enjoyable and building out your lances and all the individual characters is enjoyable as well.--Fair amount of class variety for you to build out your armies with.

Cons:--Learning curve for new units is pretty steep and having to babysit them as they slog up to a usable level is a bit tedious.--Lance management gets a bit clunky as the unit counts go up and eventually you can recruit armies that are simply too much for the enemies in early access to handle.--Crafting system is a great idea but the rarity of the components and the relative differences in the damage outputs between crafted vs. sold/dropped gear just aren't worth it.--Crafting components are also too rare to make generating non-human armies viable which cuts down on the unit variety.

I really like the concept of the game. The graphics are well done. A lot of strategic options when it comes to forming lances.Multiple classes are something to adore. The game has great potential, but yet needs much polishing.It has currently a good number of game breaking bugs that i wish the developers would look unto soon.

It’s not often that an indie game manages to achieve greatness, but this time it did. The storyline of the game needs a tad more depth, (as of now) but this game has a lot going for it.

>Deep RPG elements

The roleplaying features of this game are actually deeper than most CRPGS you’ll run across. Multiple classes with unique gear, and skills your characters can learn all in a system which makes sense for a strategy RPG. Think XCOM, but much deeper.

>Interesting storyline

As this is an early access game, the story needs a lot of fleshing out still, but that’s to be expected in such an ambitious project. The characters have some unique personality quirks, and despite the fact that this game is still early in development, it already feels like there is a deeper sub text to the story, which I personally am dying to explore.

>Enjoyable visuals

In many ways, the game is reminiscent of some of the older final fantasy games. All pixel graphics, and it’s nothing fancy, but you know full well what you’re looking at and there’s a lot of nostalgic appeal to this. For instance, watching a scrimmage unfold while waiting for your lance’s mage to unleash absolute havoc in his/her distinguishable blue robes is unbelievably satisfying.

>Enjoyable to master

Often times games are so complex that by the time you’ve learned to use all of the features, you’ve lost interest in the game. This is not the case with Himeko Sutori. All of the systems such as crafting are indeed deep, but it’s nothing that’s just frustrating to use. Once you learn how things work, it’s very easy to spend hours delving into things such as crafting, or balancing a lance out properly.

>You care about the characters

In a lot of ways, Himeko Sutori reminds me of Fire Emblem, or the aforementioned Xcom. You do start to really care about the characters and this gives battles a real feeling of tangible relevance. It’s not just that “wow, my young adventure girl died, that sucks,” it’s “wow Hiroki died… ♥♥♥♥, I’ve had her since early in the game, and she’s turned the tide of many battles.”

>Roster depth

You can do a lot in Himeko Sutori. Want a lance with nothing, but waifus? No problem. Yeap you can do that. Want one with nothing, but slimes? Yeap, you can do that too. The game gives you many ways to play, which is really nice especially considering how most games today have a few dominate play styles which you’re almost forced to stick to.

>Mod-ability

The game isn’t that horribly complex, and the developers have been highly cooperative with moders. You can likely expect to see a mod for pretty much anything you want by the time the game is complete. Just look at the Steam discussions for the game. Normally when a moder brings something up, the devs are right there to address it.

The negatives.Keep in mind that this is still an EA game, so many of these problems will likely be addressed by the time you read this.

>UI

The game’s UI can be a bit of a mess at times. It can be quite difficult sometimes to actually outfit your characters with the right gear.

>Balancing

Some classes are just outright better than others. For instance, I cannot see why you’d ever make an “illusionist” character. The non-DPS or healer characters just seem like they don’t pull their own weight. This is of course ignoring the skills they learn while in those classes, which are often very useful, but as it stands right now, you’ll most likely treat these positions as trainee positions. I’ll give an example for this. I kept the fairy you get at the start of the game in her “saboteur like class,” just purely so she could raise her leadership stat via the “control” skill. As soon as she was a solid option for a lance commander, I switched her over to a DPS class.

>It helps to have a map…

Half the time you can’t find where you’re suppose to be going because the areas are massive, and you can’t just scroll around over the world view to where everything is. This leaves you lost, and confused half of the time.

All in all, this game is great. If it wasn’t an indie game, I’d say it was worth a solid 8/10. Given the fact that it is not only an indie game, but one still in development, I have to give it a 10/10. I’m honestly thinking about deleting my save, and restarting just purely because I want to relive the IMCOMPLETE game I’ve already played. I can only imagine how great this game will be, when it finally gets to the polishing stage.